The Bureau of Counterpropaganda

Tuesday, 6 June 2017

A
review of Boycotting
Israel is wrong: the progressive path to peace between Palestinians
and Israelis
by Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth (Newsouth: 2015)

Two
Monash academics, ‘progressive Jewish opponents of the
“Israel-always-right” lobby’, enunciate a moral objection to
solidarity with the Palestinian call to boycott Israel and ‘the
progressive path to peace’ through ethnic partition.

There
was a time, at least in my fevered imagination, when no academic
worth their salt would be caught dead knocking down straw
men
or deploying other fallacious forms of 'argument'. That time, if
there ever was such a time, has clearly come to an end.

With
howlers on virtually every page, it's hard to know where to start, so
I'll begin with the cover, because sometimes you can
tell a book by its cover. Titles may reveal something about the
content. With Philip
Mendes
and Nick
Dyrenfurth's
(M&D) Boycotting
Israel is wrong,
it is clear from the outset that what's in the tin is their opinion.
But with the authors decked out in academic garb and the book
festooned with the trappings of an academic monograph, you could be
forgiven for expecting some kind of evidence based argument
demonstrating either that boycotts are wrong in general, or that
Israel is somehow a special case. They claim to ‘critically
analyse the key arguments for and against the BDS’
(p. 13), but never get around to the arguments for
BDS in any recognisable form. The word arguably
is arguably one of their favourites, but they are disinclined to
construct actual arguments.

The
subtitle, The
progressive path to peace between Palestinians and Israelis,
is much more deceptive. It strongly suggests that the authors have
identified the one and only path to peace that is also progressive.
In reality, when they get around to revealing 'The
progressive alternative to BDS'
in the final five pages, it transpires that they 'do
not pretend to have all the answers to solving this bitter and
complex conflict',
after all (p. 146). Their favoured progressive path to peace,
moreover, is neither progressive nor just, nor do they identify a
viable path to it.

The
bee in their bonnet is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
campaign (BDS) launched in 2005 by a large coalition of Palestinian
unions and other groups. In reality, most BDS activity relates
specifically to boycotts, particularly the academic and cultural
boycott. Some divestment initiatives have appeared, while formal
sanctions imposed by other states remain at the aspirational stage.
M&D gloat unbecomingly that in its first ten years, BDS has
failed to secure its stated objectives, having forgotten that the
analogous campaign against apartheid South Africa, launched in 1959,
required a full 35 years to overthrow the apartheid regime.

They
take particular pleasure in 'the
continuing inability of BDS activities to secure union support'
(p. 130), but must have submitted their manuscript before EricLee's
December 2014 talk on 'Why
Israel is losing the battle in the world’s trade unions'.
Lee was explicitly speaking on behalf of TULIP
– Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine, about which more
later. Meanwhile, rank and file unionists are increasingly
challenging
their leaders’ anti BDS stances.

'No
democratic government',
they crow, 'has
endorsed any form of boycott…'
(p. 6) 'Arguably,
the greatest achievement of the BDS campaign thus far has been the
inflammatory contribution of its activists to the tone of an already
heated debate'
(p. 7), or as I would put it, BDS’s principal contribution so far
has been to raise the level of discussion
by increasing awareness of the issues beyond what I expected in 2005.

If
BDS were really as ineffective and irrelevant as they make out, it's
curious that the Israeli government and others
need to convene conferences
on it. And to crack
down
on BDS activity; and to lift
BDS founder Omar Barghouti's travel documents. And to orchestrate
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on BDS
websites.
And to seek
‘left’ cover
from the liberal Zionist lobby group, J
Street.
One
US state after another
is pushing through patently unconstitutional legislation penalising
BDS activity. The Governor of New York rammed through an executive
decree
to this effect when the bill failed in the state legislature. Great
resources and effort have been poured into attempting to portray BDS
as inherently antisemitic,
to redefine antisemitism
accordingly, and to see this enshrined in university policies and
legislation
at everylevel
of government,
including the US
State Department.
US presidential candidates vow
‘to make countering BDS a priority’. And indeed, the authors,
themselves, felt the need to write this book about it. In fairness to
M&D, I note that some of these developments have occurred since
they submitted their manuscript.

These
non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets
its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable
right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of
international law by:

Ending
its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling
the Wall

Recognizing
the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to
full equality; and

Respecting,
protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to
return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution
194.

For
the record, I have reservations of my own about this formulation,
mainly because it is couched in terms of International Law™.
Without belabouring the subject at length, any law is subject to
revision and interpretation. Israeli apologists assert,
for instance, 'Since
Israel withdrew from 91% of the territories [conquered
in June 1967]
when it gave up the Sinai, it has already partially, if not wholly,
fulfilled its obligation under [UN
Security Council resolution]
242.'
And in a casuistic reading of the text of 242
and discussions in framing the phrase ‘from
territories occupied’,
they have a point, although ‘the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’
militates against such an interpretation.

Meanwhile,
Israeli academics and ethicists are exerting themselves to rewrite
the laws of war. ShuratHaDin,
which is a front
for Israeli intelligence service Mossad, ‘is
utilizing court systems around the world to go on the legal offensive
against Israel’s enemies’.
Their June 2016 conference
on the law of war ‘is
to influence the direction of legal discourse concerning issues
critical to Israel and her ability to defend herself. The law of war
is mainly unwritten and develops on the basis of state practice.’
So relevant areas of International Law™ are currently in flux
and their interpretation may not end up favouring a just outcome.
Furthermore, insofar as International Law™ is enforceable,
the Security Council resolution necessary to authorise enforcement
action requires US agreement. So the UN can impose sanctions on
countries that comply with their treaty obligations, like Iran's
compliance with the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but the US and
its friends are never susceptible to sanction, however egregious
their violations. The BDS
call,
itself, explicitly recognises that ‘all
forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now
failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law’.

Returning
to M&D’s concerns, the expression 'all
Arab lands'
is susceptible to interpretation as including Israel Proper™, and
not just the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, that is
the most plausible parsing. Or would be, if the BDS National
Committee had not clarified
the first demand [my
emphasis],
'Ending
its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied
in June 1967 and
dismantling the Wall'.
Many activists who support the Palestinian struggle, including the
majority of BDS supporters, would reject M&D’s interpretation.
For them, as for M&D, 'the
acquisition of territory by war'
was 'inadmissable'
in 1967, but not in 1948, when Israel annexed more than half the
territory left to the Arab state in the UN General Assembly's bizarre
1947 partition plan (UNGA
Resolution 181),
which had already allocated about 55% of the land for the ‘Jewish
state’. There is a plausible
argument
that the UN
Charter
does not empower the General Assembly to partition League of Nations
mandates, as it did Palestine in 1947, in the first place.

Presumably,
this inconsistency arises from the view that Israel, uniquely among
countries, possesses a sacred and inalienable 'right to exist',
unlike, say, Yugoslavia. After all, Israel within the 3 April 1949
armistice line ('the Green Line') with Jordan, commonly referred to
as Israel’s ‘border’, is the entity the UN General Assembly
Resolution 273 (III) cynically admitted
to membership
in 1949. And that makes everything alright.

The
delusion that a Jewish state, unlike a Christian state, an Islamic
state, a White state…, is fundamentally legitimate, underlies all
of M&D's concerns. So they are also perturbed that, even if the
first aim of BDS is interpreted narrowly as referring to the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, withdrawing to the
Green Line could give rise to 'potential
military threats following an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank'
(pp. 46-47). As if security concerns, paranoid or not, somehow
justify acquisition of territory by war. Regarding 'the West Bank
security barrier', as they are pleased to call the wall, eschewing
the Israeli 'separation wall (or fence)' (Hebrew: חומת
orגדר
ההפרדה (khomat
(or geder)
hahafradah),
presumably lest anyone think hafradah
'separation'
means 'apartheid'. 'Undeniably,’
they claim, ‘the
barrier has stopped suicide bombings and terror attacks launched
against Israel'
(p. 47). With thousands of West Bank Palestinians trapped in the
‘seam’ between the Green Line and the wall, and many more
crossing into Israel daily to find work, there may be grounds for
doubting its efficacy, and some have, indeed, denied that it was the
principal factor in the observed reduction in attacks. According to
Amos
Harel,
writing in Ha'aretz
in
2006, '...[t]he
security fence is no longer mentioned as the major factor in
preventing suicide bombings, mainly because the terrorists have found
ways to bypass it'.

M&D
reject the second demand on the grounds that they harbour a suspicion
that 'the
true agenda may not be civil equality for all citizens of Israel, but
rather collective national rights for Arabs requiring the
transformation of Israel into a binational state, or worse...BDS
supporters are prone to suggest that Jews are not a bona fide nation
deserving of national rights of their own'
(p. 47). They acknowledge that the 20% of Israelis who are
Palestinian comprise an oppressed minority, steering well clear of
issues relating to land use and restrictions on residence. They cite
with approval a list of measures that Ilan
Peleg
and Dov
Waxman
propose in their Israel's
Palestinians: the conflict within
(CUP: 2011), ironically, even though they recommend 'recognising
the Palestinians as a national minority group’,
which sounds suspiciously like the national rights for Arabs that
they explicitly reject. They decline, moreover, to address how to
prompt the Israeli government to commit to ‘facilitating
increased cultural autonomy, introducing laws to protect Arabs from
official or popular prejudice and establishing affirmative action
programs to enhance their socio-economic status'
(p, 51), again ignoring the land issue. Such measures may indeed
'appear
to address the concerns raised by the BDS movement',
some of them, anyway, but there is no suggestion of how to get from
here to there.

Finally
(pp. 51, 53),

The
third and most controversial demand is for a Palestinian Right of
Return...thus BDS is justly regarded by many as a war against Israel
by other means...The mass return of potentially six million
Palestinians...would change the demographic composition of Israel
profoundly and almost certainly turn the Jewish population into a
disempowered minority. It is inherently inconsistent with a two-state
solution. ...The
only sane and dignified solution to the refugee tragedy is the
resettlement of all Palestinian refugees with compensation as either
full citizens in the neighbouring Arab countries in which most have
lived for over 65 years, or alternatively as citizens of a new
Palestinian state…

It's
not for nothing that hasbarah
('propaganda') establishment insist that Israel's
acceptance of a "right
of return"
would amount to national
suicide.
The
expression 'national
suicide'
is transparently intended to evoke images of hordes of scimitar
wielding Arabs driving the defenceless Jews into the Mediterranean.
But if a significant proportion of the refugees decided to exercise
their right of return, it would indeed alter the demographic balance.
And if the returned refugees were enfranchised, as they must be, it
is certainly plausible that they would vote to remove the reality and
trappings of the Jewish ethnocracy. Jews would be as empowered or
disempowered as any citizen of any bourgeois democracy.

The
BDS movement is actually agnostic on the question of one state or
two, and as I mentioned, many BDS supporters favour the Two State
Solution™ (TSS). Ali
Abunimahargues
that the right of return is consistent with the establishment of two
states, provided both are democratic and secular. The BDS call is
only 'incompatible
with a two-state solution that protects Israel’s “Jewish
character” by keeping out Palestinian refugees just because they
are not Jews'.
But this strikes me as disingenuous, as the whole point of the TSS is
precisely to preserve Jewish privilege in the Jewish state, so for
those demanding partition, it is a distinction without a difference.

It
is worth noting that the refugees originate as the victims of the
Zionists' ambition for a Jewish majority. The idea of 'transfer', or
what we call 'ethnic cleansing' nowadays, has been integral to
Zionist thought virtually from its inception, as documented in Nur
Masalha's
Expulsion
of the Palestinians:
The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948.
When,
after three waves of aliyah
(‘ascent’, i.e. Jewish immigration) and the influx of refugees
from Europe after the Holocaust, Jews still only comprised about a
third of the population of Mandatory Palestine in 1947, it became
necessary to reduce the number of Arabs. Accordingly, in March 1948
pre state Zionist militias began the process of 'transfer'.

It
is frequently alleged that there were no expulsions or massacres.
Mistakes were made and Palestinians fled in 'the fog of war'. In
reality, '...months
before the entry of Arab forces into Palestine...namely before 15 May
[when
Israel declared independence]
– the Jewish forces had already succeeded in forcibly expelling
almost a quarter of a million Palestinians'.
(Ilan
Pappé,
2006, The
ethnic cleansing of Palestine,
p. xv). By the end of Israel's 'War of Independence' in 1949, about
750,000 Palestinians, 75% or more of the population, had been
expelled and were permanently refused reentry.

Others
aver that since the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan at
the end of 1947, they deserved expulsion. Still others that they left
voluntarily, as enjoined by 'Arab leaders' in radio
broadcasts
now known never to have taken place, with a view to returning in the
wake of the victorious Arab armies.

Whatever
the reasons for their departure, there is no conceivable pretext to
bar their return, and shoot those who tried as 'infiltrators', save
that they could dilute the nascent Jewish state's Jewish character.
That remains the pretext and it is hard to fathom how anyone who
calls themselves 'progressive' could characterise the cruelty of
condemning three quarters of a million people and their descendants
to permanent exile as 'sane
and dignified'.

Among
opponents of BDS, a popular trope is (p. 8),

BDS
singles out only Israel for boycott, ignoring far worse human rights
abuses and bitter ethnic-religious conflicts. If anything, Israeli
actions are far less brutal than the behaviour of China in Tibet,
Indonesia in Aceh and formerly East Timor and Russia in Chechnya.
This is to say nothing of the persecution of minority racial or
religious groups within Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iran, Rwanda and elsewhere.

There
are three problems with this. First, the reason that BDS targets
Israel and not Indonesia is that it is Palestinians who have
requested our solidarity in this form. The Tibetans, the West
Papuans, the Puerto Ricans, and other colonised peoples have not. It
is worth pointing out that many, probably most, activists who support
Palestinian liberation are also active in other antiracist, antiwar,
environmental, and other movements. Each movement 'singles out' the
issues that concern it. Curiously, M&D and the rest of the
hasbarah
('propaganda') industry have not criticised the gay rights movement
for its silence on Tibet, or on Palestine, and for some reason single
out BDS supporters for criticism.

Secondly,
Israel is the only coloniser routinely defended in politics,
diplomacy, and the media from its own victims. And finally, the
argument 'I don't deserve punishment because someone else did
something worse', is no more cogent coming from the hasbarah
establishment than it is from the mouth of a four year old child.

'BDS
advocates',
they assert, '...construct
superficial and false race-based analogies between Israeli policies
and earlier South African apartheid, rather than acknowledging the
real complexity of two peoples with equally legitimate national
aspirations struggling over one piece of land'
(p. 2). ‘The
Israel-apartheid analogy is seriously flawed on political, historical
and factual grounds’
(pp. 53-54).

This
is another popular hasbarah
trope. When Palestine solidarity activists, and others, characterise
Israel as an apartheid state, they are not asserting that Israel is
exactly the same as apartheid South Africa. South African Archbishop
Desmond
Tutu,
in contrast, says, 'I
know firsthand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within
its borders and through its occupation. The parallels to my own
beloved South Africa are painfully stark indeed'.

'The
crucial difference',
writes Moshe
Machover,
'is
whether the indigenous population is harnessed as a labour force to
be exploited, a source of surplus product; or excluded from the
settlers’ economy – marginalized, exterminated or expelled,
ethnically cleansed'.
Apartheid South Africa exemplified the first ‘species’ of settler
colonialism; Israel, like the US and Australia, the second.
Furthermore, White South Africans comprised only about 10% of the
population, while Jews in the area of Mandatory Palestine are a small
majority.

But
it should go without saying that nothing is exactly the same as
anything else. Without grouping together things we perceive as
similar, we couldn't even speak. As it happens, the
Rome
statute
defines the concept.

"The
crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts...committed in the
context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and
domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups
and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

It’s
not in dispute that ‘Arabs
experience systematic disadvantage’
(p. 48), but there are doubtless those who would claim that these
definitions do not apply because Palestinians, or Arabs, are not a
‘racial group’, or that Jews and Arabs belong to the same ‘racial
group’. They betray a misunderstanding of race. To do so suggests
that they think race
is a useful biological category for describing human populations. In
the latter case, they are also deriving putative biological
categories from biblical narrative or linguistic classification. The
fundamental thing about racial categories is that although they rely
in some measure on the perception of descent, they are basically
social categories constructed by racism. The markers that racists use
to identify a race are arbitrary and may be as varied as skin
pigmentation, nose or eye shape, hair colour or texture, religious
observance, language, or surname.

Since
it is racists who construct racial identities, their definitions are
the most relevant. In the case of Jews, some of the racial markers
have actually been formally codified in such documents as the 1935
Nazi Nuremburg
Laws,
which defined Jews in terms of descent from ‘Full-blooded
Jewish grandparents’,
who ‘are
those who belonged to the Jewish religious community,’
and the Israeli Law
of
Return,
for whose purposes, ‘"Jew"
means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become
converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion’.
‘The
rights of a Jew’
are vested in a Jew’s spouse, descendants, and their spouses.

The evidence that racists perceive the 'cultural'
or 'ideological' traits ascribed to Muslims, for example, as
biological in origin is precisely that they treat the assimilated as
if there were no possibility of assimilation, as if the traits were
inherent in all those who 'look Muslim', have Muslim names, live in
Muslim neighbourhoods, or whatever markers they may prefer. If they
weren't lying about it being 'just cultural', assimilation would in
fact protect the assimilated.

That’s
why Israeli police can shoot, and a crowd of Jewish lynchers beat, an
Eritrean
man
during a stabbing incident in Beersheva last October ‘only
because of the color of his skin’. That’s why an anti Muslim
fanatic could open fire in a Sikh
temple in Wisconsin in 2012.

'BDS
also',
M&D assert, defeating scarecrows on all sides,

collectively
punishes all Israelis for the actions of their state; it demonises
Jews who oppose it; it educates followers that the Jewish state is at
the centre of all that is wrong in the world; it puts a campaign
against the Jewish state at the top of the agenda of progressive
activists; it pushes many Jews out of progressive movements and
strengthens the hand of hardliners in Israel allowing them to
perpetuate a 'bunker mentality' among sections of the population. In
both Western and Arab worlds, BDS recycles images of Jews as
bloodthirsty oppressors exercising disproportionate influence; and
popularises the specious idea that people who raise the issue of
anti-Semitism are doing so in bad faith in order to silence any
criticism of the Israeli State.
(p. 8)

It's
true that a boycott is a blunt instrument. 'And
the evidence increasingly points to one set of victims: the
Palestinians',
weeps Alex
Margolin,
shedding crocodile tears. Yet it is the Palestinians themselves who
have called for the boycott, in full cognisance that the effects
would flow on to them, just as were the Black South Africans before
them. Well
meaning Israelis
impacted by boycotts understand that it is a price they have to pay
if they hope to budge their government from the status quo.

The
recently lifted sanctions
against Iran
were in full force when M&D were drafting their book. It punished
all Iranians for the alleged actions of their state. Similarly, the
sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s claimed up to half a million
children's lives. Unlike in Israel, there is little pretence that
Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollahs actually represented the views of
the people they ruled. And indeed, if opinion
polls
are any guide, the Israeli government's intransigence really does
represent the will of the majority of Israeli Jews. As far as I can
ascertain, M&D have not spoken out against the genocidalsanctions
against Iraq. They certainly have not even mentioned Iran or Iraq in
Boycotting
Israel is wrong,
as if they themselves were singling Israel out for special treatment.

BDS,
per
se,
does not demonise anyone. BDS activists are doubtless critical of
Israeli policy and of BDS opponents whether they are Jewish or not.
It's dubious that any of this amounts to demonisation, but to
whatever extent that it may, it is individual
activists
rather than the movement that is doing it. M&D themselves,
however, are no strangers to demonisation. They insist on denigrating
principled antiracist activists as 'anti-Zionist
fundamentalists'
(p. 36 et
passim)
without defining fundamentalism
or engaging the views they dismiss as
‘beyond
rational debate and unconnected to contemporary or historical
reality’
(p. 36).

'Today’,
they write, ‘there
are arguably three principal Left positions on Zionism and Israel
that largely inform progressive attitudes to the BDS movement’.
The first is ‘balanced...favouring
a two-state solution’,
‘both
pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian’,
and exemplified by such rusted on neoliberal ideologues and war
criminals as ‘the
former New Labour leader Tony Blair…'
(p. 32). And presumably the authors, themselves. Progressive,
remember.

The
second blames Israel and ignores alleged ‘Palestinian
rejection of Israeli
offers of statehood...,
the 2005 election victory of Hamas, and the near universal
Palestinian demand for the return of 1948 refugees...'
(p. 35) Of course they mean the January 2006
election, about which that bastion of democracy promotion, former US
Secretary of State and disappointed contender for leadership of The
Free World™,
Hillary
Clinton
is reported to have said, ‘…we
should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to
win …’ So while Israel goes on
building
settlements, hogging
water, demolishing
homes
and villages,
wells,
rainwatercisterns,
solar
panels,
and playgrounds;
uprooting olive
orchards; bombing and
shelling schools,
hospitals,
and residential
buildings; arresting
and torturingchildren;
imprisoning
dissentersindefinitely
without charge...the
Palestinians are really equally to blame for Israel’s refusal to
withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, because they voted for the
wrong party 10 years ago and – what is most unforgivable of all –
demand justice for the refugees. The ‘offers
of statehood’
they mention would have left the refugees and the Israeli
Palestinians in the lurch, among other things, which no credible
Palestinian negotiator could ever accept.

As
for 'The
third left perspective’,
which they ‘term
anti-Zionist fundamentalism’,
they accuse us of regarding ‘Israel
as a racist, colonialist state’!
‘Active
support’,
they allege, ‘is
provided to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah’,
as if to insinuate we were donning keffiyehs and going off to fight
with the al Qassam Brigades. What they are probably referring to is
our defence of the occupied people’s right to resist occupation, a
no brainer for anyone who purports to endorse human
rights,
much less anyone on the actual left.

One
of their most bizarre assertions is that ‘This
form of anti-Zionism is substantively different to the earlier
pre-1948 Left tradition of anti-Zionism. That tradition opposed
Zionism as a political movement on theoretical grounds. Anti-Zionist
fundamentalists today wish to eliminate the existing nation State of
Israel.’
By eliminate,
they mean ‘transform
from the ethnocratic “state of the Jewish People” to a state of
its citizens’.
But eliminate
sounds so much more dramatic and threatening. Seriously. Who do they
think they’re going to hoodwink with these transparent rhetorical
ploys? Anyway, their view seems to be that it was ok to oppose
establishing a Jewish ethnocracy when it was but a glint in the eye
of the most retrograde elements of European Jewry. After all,
‘anti-Zionism
was also influential within mainstream Jewish establishment
groups...Many Jews appear to have regarded Zionism as an extremist
movement...’
(p. 18). But now that Israel is a fait
accompli,
actively oppressing actual Palestinians as the pre-1948 antiZionists
feared, or worse, it’s off limits.

Furthermore,
‘anti-Zionist
fundamentalists portray Israel as a mere political construct’
(p. 37), as if any country was anything else.

Returning
to their objections to BDS, per
se,
their allegation that BDS 'educates
followers that the Jewish state is at the centre of all that is wrong
in the world'
is constructed from whole cloth.

But
they are right to say 'it
puts a campaign against the Jewish state at the top of the agenda of
progressive activists'.
They clearly intend this as a criticism, but surely anyone who
opposes racism is obliged to make the defeat of ethnocracy a
priority. Furthermore, it is clear from the very existence of their
book that M&D want Israel and the defence of Israel precisely 'at
the top of the agenda of progressive activists',
as it apparently is of their own.

Jews
may leave progressive movements because the
movements are sympathetic to BDS,
which is probably what M&D mean when they write, 'it
pushes many Jews out of progressive movements'.
This is likely because they feel uneasy, offended, even threatened
when Israel comes under criticism. Such feelings can only arise when
they strongly identify with the Jewish state and feel personally
responsible for its actions and safety, which is not in dispute, as
M&D imply the ‘centrality
of the State of Israel to contemporary Jewish identity’
(p. 37).
If the BDS movement articulated the view that Australian Jews were
personally responsible for the terrorism and ethnic cleansing that
brought Israel into existence, or Israeli home demolitions and
extrajudicial executions in the here and now, M&D would likely be
apoplectic in condemning the blatant antisemitism. But if Jewish
'progressives' pack up their principles and flee progressive
movements on that basis, M&D construe them as the victims.

A
'bunker
mentality'
is hardwired into Israel's DNA - ‘a
rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed
to barbarism’,
as Theodor Herzl, the
father of Zionism, wrote in The
Jewish state
in 1896, 'Zionist
colonisation...can proceed and develop only...behind an iron
wall,
which the native population cannot breach'.
It will be perpetuated by 'hardliners'
and more than just a few 'sections
of the population',
with or without BDS.

The
'images
of Jews as bloodthirsty oppressors'
probably include cartoons like this.
The soldier is depicted with the Israeli flag on his helmet, so it
should be plain that it is Israel, and not 'The Jews' who are the
oppressors. But the Magen
David
that dominates the Israeli flag is also a widely recognised symbol of
Judaism and Jewry, so the cartoonist must really mean 'The Jews'.
It's no coincidence that Israel chose the
Jewish symbol for its own, and one of the reasons was precisely to
create ambiguity
and confusion.

If
there is no distinction between Zionism and Jewishness, and the prime
minister of Israel claims to speak as “a representative of the
entire Jewish people,” then ignorant or malicious people have a
free pass to consider all Jews responsible for Israel’s crimes
against the Palestinian people.

Whether
individual Jews wield ‘disproportionate
influence’
is an empirical question, assuming there is some agreed measure of
‘influence’. But it is not the BDS movement that is putting it
about that ‘The Jews’ are influential. It is the Zionists. ‘We
have influence; we have great power, we have tremendous resources…’,
as Ronald
S. Lauder,
President of the World Jewish Congress, put it in March 2016.

It
is indeed a ‘specious
idea that people who raise the issue of anti-Semitism are doing so in
bad faith in order to silence any criticism of the Israeli State’,
although again, the BDS movement doesn't say this. Manifestations of
antisemitism do occur, although they are very rare in Europe, North
America, and The Antipodes. Gangs of antisemitic thugs do sometimes
roam the streets, but their targets these days are principally
Muslims. There are occasional antisemitic remarks overheard, and some
graffiti. Still, the antisemitism industry sensationalises its extent
and severity, and in a sense this does serve to stifle criticism –
after all, if Jews are in so
much danger
in the US, surely they must do what it takes to protect their escape
pod.
And American
Jews
are convinced that antisemitism is a problem. But it is patently not
the kind of problem that would result in discrimination
against Jews
in access to housing, employment, education, or any other resources
or services, much less to racial profiling by the police.

But
while not every
mention of antisemitism is in bad faith, it is transparently the case
that BDS opponents frequently accuse BDS and BDS activists of
antisemitism. Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has raised US$50 million
to combat BDS on US campuses. There is a campaign across the US,
Canada, and Great Britain to enact legislation infringing or
prohibiting BDS activity that explicitly identifies BDS as
antisemitic in and of itself. The Amcha Initiative recently published
a report
that not only explicitly identifies antiZionism as antisemitic, but
also counts BDS activity as both a cause and an indicator of
antisemitism!

MYTH:
The BDS is a non-violent political strategy that rejects the suicide
bombings and other forms of terror previously utilised by
Palestinians against Israeli civilians.

FACT:
The BDS does not involve a principled rejection of terrorism. Rather,
it promotes boycott as a more effective means of waging political war
against Israel.

It's
true that the BDS Movement website is silent on the issue of
terrorism. There's no particular reason advocates of one set of
tactics need to take a position on any other. The function of this
sentence is to insinuate the idea that Palestinian terrorism always
targets innocent noncombatants. In reality, much of the Palestinian
violence reported as terrorism targets the occupation
forces.
While violence against an occupying army is entirely legitimate, it
invites repression and may not be particularly effective.

This
is actually part of the initiative to rewrite the laws of war I
mentioned earlier. Among the principles ethicists like Asa
Kasher
promote is that an Israeli 'combatant
is a citizen in uniform...If it's between the soldier and the
terrorist's neighbor, the priority is the soldier',
handily justifying deliberate harm to noncombatants. In a classic
example of ends justifying means, the concept of ‘proportionality’,
so often invoked in relation to Israel’s biennial attacks on Gaza,
is defined explicitly with respect to military objectives in the
first place, not, as commonly believed, to the severity of the
purported provocation.

Israel,
itself, is of course immune from accusations of terrorism, which is
conveniently defined
to exclude state violence,
regardless of the methods used, the target, and the intent to sow
fear. But those who demand that the BDS movement explicitly distance
itself from terrorist attacks on civilians might want to express a
view on how, exercising the greatest care to avoid hitting
noncombatants with their sophisticated, precision weapons, Israeli
forces hit civilians
71.6% of the time in their November 2012 attack on Gaza. As Lt.
Col. Avital Leibovich,
head spokeswoman to foreign media for the Israel Defense Forces,
wrote at the time,

Such
terrorists, who hold cameras and notebooks in their hands, are no
different from their colleagues who fire rockets aimed at Israeli
cities and cannot enjoy the rights and protection afforded to
legitimate journalists.

It
might also behove them to distance themselves from the terrorism
of the Haganah and other pre-state Zionist militias that made Israel
possible.

It's
not sufficient that BDS promotes nonviolent tactics, because the
objective, like that of the terrorists themselves, is war against
Israel. The reason M&D know it is war against Israel is that in
their view, achievement of BDS's stated aims would erode the Jewish
majority, leading to the end of Israel as a Jewish state, which they
are pleased to characterise as 'the
elimination of the Jewish state'.

MYTH:
The BDS is designed to protect the human rights of Palestinians. It
is not intended to harm the rights of Israelis.

FACT:
If successful, the BDS would almost certainly produce the ethnic
cleansing of most Israeli Jews from their homeland.

Executing
an impressive cognitive leap, the end of Israel's Jewish majority and
Jewish character leads directly to ethnic cleansing of Jews, and not
from just anywhere, but their homeland, no less. M&D must have
missed the memo alerting them that 'would
almost certainly'
does not comprise a persuasive argument. And again, their reticence
on the matter of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948,
again in 1967,
and ongoing forcedrelocation,
deprivation of residency rights, and so forth from their
homeland, suggests that they are again singling Israel out for
special dispensation.

MYTH:
Opponents of BDS are right-wing Zionists who oppose Palestinian
national rights.

FACT:
Many of the leading critics of BDS are two-staters who support the
creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Many
of those who oppose BDS are in fact Zionists and some of them oppose
national rights for Palestinians, while others are, as M&D's
'Fact' avers, prepared to extend them to Palestinian residents of
parts of the West Bank that Israel doesn't want.

Rightwing
Zionists
and leftwing
Zionists
are virtually unanimous in opposing BDS. What they have in common is
adherence to the ideology that a particular ethnic group is entitled
to a state that privileges its members as such. In any other context,
there would be no possibility of mistaking such an ideology as in any
way left or 'progressive'. As indeed there is not in this context.

MYTH:
BDS supporters are moderates who merely wish to promote the same
human rights for Palestinians that exist for Israelis.

FACT:
Most of the leading BDS advocates are long-time extremists who
support the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab
majority state of Greater Palestine.

Nobody
is claiming that all BDS activists are moderates – moderates are
rarely activists of any stripe. The significant point is that the BDS
movement does promote equal rights – specifically, the right not to
be occupied by a hostile military force; the right to a nationality
and to vote; and the right of reunion with exiles.

M&D
like to characterise those who oppose partition of Palestine in
favour of a unified, democratic, secular state, or a binational
state, as extremists. Equal rights, regardless of religion and
ancestry; one person one vote; and the right of refugees to go home
are not generally regarded as extremist positions. On the contrary,
partition on ethnic grounds is the extreme position. Indeed,
as Ilan
Pappé
pointed out last year,

You
have to come back to any historical case studies you remember of an
anti-colonialist movement fighting a colonialist power and ask
yourself, at any given moment was the idea of partitioning the land
between the colonizer and the colonized portrayed as a reasonable
solution? Especially by people who were on the left or saw themselves
as conscientious members of the society? And the answer is a
resounding no, of course you would not support the division of
Algeria between the French settlers and the native Algerians. And
even in places where you had settler colonialism, namely where you
had white people who had nowhere to go in a way, like in South
Africa, if you would suggest today as a progressive person that you
should divide South Africa between the white population and the
African population, you would be regarded at best as insane, and at
worst as someone who is insincere and a fascist….

‘Greater
Palestine’
is apparently an expression of Mendes’s own coinage,
subsequently adopted by Henry
Siegman
in The
Huffington Post,
and no one else.
The intention is to create the illusion of ‘balance’ between the
most extreme Zionists, who call for the annexation of ‘Judea and
Samaria’ and the expulsion of the remaining Palestinians to create
a ‘Greater Israel’ on the one hand, and those who advocate
democracy on the other. The implication is that creation of a
democratic ‘Greater Palestine’ would necessarily entail expulsion
or oppression of the Jewish population of present day Israel,
consistent with their ‘almost certainty’ about ethnic cleansing.

MYTH:
The BDS movement eschews all forms of racism including anti-Semitism.

FACT:
The BDS movement is based on the ethnic stereotyping of all Israelis
and Jewish supporters of Israel as evil, and has produced numerous
manifestations of anti-Semitism.

Among
those who support BDS, there are probably some who harbour
antisemitic attitudes and even express them. Their presence in the
movement doesn't make BDS fundamentally antisemitic, as M&D
insinuate, any more than the occasional antisemitic
remark
makes all Zionists antisemitic. There are other reasons that Zionism
is inherently antisemitic.

Boycotting
Israel has nothing to do with stereotyping anybody as anything. The
objective is to pressure the Israeli government to comply with
specific provisions of International Law™.
The boycott targets Israeli businesses and institutions and effects
can flow on to individuals, usually insofar as they act or are
perceived as representative of those institutions. Jewish and non
Jewish supporters of Israel are not ‘evil’. But neither are they
political allies of left and progressive forces that reject racism,
colonialism, and ethnocracy on principle, pace
M&D.

MYTH:
Jewish anti-Zionists who support BDS are a growing force in Jewish
life internationally.

FACT:
Jewish anti-Zionists are a tiny group in Jewish communities, and
would constitute well below one per cent of the Jewish population.
They are even a small minority amongst left-wing Jews.

There
is no contradiction between the assertion that ‘Jewish
anti-Zionists are a tiny group in Jewish communities’
and that we are a growing force, and as it happens, both are true.

It
is tempting to deconstruct every fallacy and every caricature, but I
think I’ve established that, in a nutshell, their objection to the
BDS campaign is that they see it as ‘a
thinly veiled campaign to resuscitate the so-called one-state
solution…’,
which challenges Israel’s ineradicable ‘right
to exist as a Jewish state’.
(p.
4) but at this stage, I will move on to ‘The
progressive path to peace between Palestinians and Israelis’.

Mendes
and Dyrenfurth persistently claim that the views they espouse are
‘progressive’. Quite apart from the appearance of protesting too
much, how likely is it that a progressive, as commonly understood,
would cite the likes of Julia Gillard and Tony Blair (p. 32) as
allies?

On
page 13, they remark parenthetically that they ‘do
not propose to explore these issues’,
but ‘the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be understood as one facet of the
conflict between elements of Islam and the West and with modernity
more generally’.
As indeed it can, if you ignore inconvenient facts and dispense with
Occam’s razor. Since this ‘understanding’ must inform their
perception of the conflict, it’s unsurprising that they come to
some strange conclusions.

They
are absolutely explicit that the ‘genuinely
progressive view’
is ‘based
on support for Israel's existence’
specifically as a Jewish state ‘and
recognition of Palestinian rights to a homeland’,
but not all of it, and hedged around with non negotiable
preconditions.

'A
progressive path to peace',
they write, 'will
ultimately be based upon three principles: empathy, dialogue and
compromise'
(p. 146). While they decline to expand on the nature of these
principles as they understand them and how they each apply in
determining 'the
progressive path',
it is possible to surmise their views from the initiatives they
favour. They support

a
just and peaceful resolution of the conflict through a two-state plan
that fosters dialogue and urges mutual compromise and concessions
from both sides who are prepared to accept a form of partial justice
rather than a zero-sum solution, ultimately key to the establishment
of two states for both peoples.
(p. 14)

If
you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side
of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse
and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your
neutrality.

The
principle of compromise sounds like a nice, fair, balanced basis for
negotiation. But it kind of matters what your starting point is. M&D
write

...the
Geneva Peace Accord...remains the benchmark for Israeli-Palestinian
conflict resolution. The Accord...proposed the establishment of a
demilitarised Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
alongside Israel accompanied by minor land swaps…
(p. 147)

The
bald assumption that the Palestinian state on the horizon
is to join Grenada
and Nauru
as a demilitarised state without a word of explanation suggests that
Mendes and Dyrenfurth, in their moderate, balanced position, are
privileging some perception of Israeli security above Palestinian
security, as if Palestinians had no reason to fear their nuclear
armed neighbour. Anyone who believes that an independent Palestinian
state bordering Israel will be able to develop free of Israeli
interference might consider how free of Israeli
interference
the independent
country to the north
has been over the last three decades, notwithstanding the UN
forces
stationed there.

Nobody,
least of all the Geneva
Initiative,
is seriously suggesting going back to square one and negotiating to
repartition Mandatory Palestine fairly into a Jewish State and a
Palestinian State with equitable access to land, resources, and
amenity. On the contrary, every proposal for a TSS I've come across
proceeds from the assumption that Israel Proper™
is not up for grabs. That means that Israel gets to keep the 55%
inequitably allocated to them by the UN General Assembly in 1947
(Resolution 181), as well as the additional 6500km2
or so, about 23%, they acquired by force of arms in 1948-49, no
questions asked. You'd think that was a significant compromise on the
part of the Palestinians to begin with. But no, it is only the 22%
that Israel occupied in June 1967 that anyone is talking about
compromising over.

Among
the compromises is 'mutually agreed land swaps'. And again, it is not
as if anyone's offering the Palestinians Tel Aviv in exchange for
Ramallah. It's always taken as read that Israel will keep the
'settlement blocs', otherwise known as 'facts on the ground', whether
the Palestinians like it or not. After all, 'many
Israelis legitimately fear that any political or territorial
concessions on the West Bank will only be used by the Palestinians to
initiate further violence'
(p. 7) and the Palestinians must empathise with their fear. Most TSSs
also assume continued Israeli control of the Jordan Valley,
completely surrounding any conceivable Palestinian state in the West
Bank, as well as crucial aquifers. (The Geneva Accord only provides
for 'a
small military presence'
in the Jordan Valley for 66 months after signing.) The other side of
the coin is what parts of Israel Proper the Palestinians might want
in exchange; or rather, that Israel would be willing to part with as
a painful compromise; or rather, which areas with concentrations of
Palestinians ('Israeli Arabs') are adjacent to the West Bank that
Israel can unload on the Palestinian State, in the spirit of hafradah'segregation'.

In
this context, the old refrain of ‘land
for peace’
inevitably arises. When you think about it, though, what’s it
really about?

The
only land that has ever been on offer, if it really was on offer at
all, is land acquired by military conquest in June 1967. The
principal import of the famous UNSC Resolution 242 is not creation of
a Palestinian state, a matter that it never even mentions, but to
emphasise ‘the
inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’.
So the land that Israel would be relinquishing is land that was never
rightfully Israel’s in the first place. It was territory acquired
by war. Not really very much of a sacrifice.

Beyond
one side of the equation of ‘land for peace’ being a bit bogus,
as the land doesn’t really belong to Israel, is the other subtext.
The suggestion is that since the Israelis are offering to give land,
it’s the Palestinians who have to deliver the peace. That, in turn
relies on the presumption that it’s the Palestinians who insist on
violence and that Israel is the passive victim. Israel is willing to
make painful sacrifices of its land if only those vicious
Palestinians would leave them in peace. In reality, of course, it is
the Palestinians who are the colonised people and on the receiving
end of most of the violence. Palestinian violence, while demonstrably
counterproductive, is wholly reactive. Amazing how they can pack all
that into an innocuous little phrase, but then the Israeli hasbara
(‘propaganda’) machine are no amateurs.

As
we've seen, M&D are particularly concerned about the 1948
refugees and their right of return, because it could erode the Jewish
majority, or, as M&D prefer to sensationalise it, ‘eliminate
the Jewish state’…‘almost
certain’
ethnic cleansing...‘Greater
Palestine’.
The principle of empathy would seem to suggest that 69 years
languishing in a refugee camp would be long enough and that the
actual victims of the actual historic ethnic cleansing were entitled
to priority consideration. Under the Geneva Accord, in its
beneficence, resettlement of refugees in Israel ‘shall
be at the sovereign discretion of Israel’.
So it transpires that after generations of exile and statelessness,
it’s the refugees who need to extend empathy to Israel’s desire
for a Jewish majority, if not ethnic purity.

With
the Palestinians doing the lion’s share of the compromise and
empathy, it’s worth enquiring which Palestinians Israel is supposed
to negotiate with. The ‘Palestinian
Authority clearly supports two states and...is still recognised by
the international community as the official representative of the
Palestinian people’
(pp. 59-60). In reality, of course, it is the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO)
and not the Palestinian
National Authority (PA)
that over 100 countries and the UN recognise as the 'sole
legitimate representative of the Palestinian people'.
But the PLO is moribund
and even the UN
General Assembly
seems to be confused about which is which.

I
think this suggests that M&D envision negotiations between Israel
and the PA, although their aspirations may be even more modest than
that. The PA is an instrumentality established under the Oslo
Accords
to absorb certain administrative and security functions from the
occupation authorities in certain areas of the West Bank and Gaza.
Its mandate to do so expired in 1999. While the PLO could lay a
legitimate claim to represent the Palestinian people as a whole,
including those resident in Israel and the diaspora, the PA can only
pretend to represent residents of the West Bank. But that is a gross
exaggeration. In reality, when the PA last held elections in January
2006, it was immediately subjected to suffocating
sanctions,
about which M&D are strangely silent, because the Palestinians
had elected the wrong party. Israel subsequently arrested
many of those elected, 17 of whom remain in Israeli
prisonsto
this day.
The sanctions persisted until June 2007, when PA President Mahmoud
Abbas, whose term expired in 2009, overthrew the unity government in
an administrative
coup,
in the West Bank, but not in Gaza,
where Hamas successfully resisted violent takeover and has been
subject to a lethal siege ever since, also unremarked by M&D.
Since there really isn't any entity that can credibly
represent
the Palestinians, the dialogue that they expect to resolve the
‘intractable conflict’ turns out to be mainly between bereaved
Israeli and Palestinian families, discussed below.

Another
thorny issue is the discrepancy in power between the dispersed and
stateless Palestinians, whoever may represent them, and an aggressive
military powerhouse. Even if you were prepared to accept the fiction
of ‘two
peoples with equally legitimate national aspirations struggling over
one piece of land’
(p. 2), it’s preposterous to suggest that the parties are evenly
matched, particularly with the US’s weighty thumb on the scales in
Israel’s favour.

One
of the ironies of the notoriously ‘complex
conflict’
is that proponents of the TSS still believe that after 49 years
pouring treasure, and even some Jewish blood, into assiduously
creating ‘facts on the ground’ with the explicit intent of
retaining the strategic hilltops and essential aquifers, Israel will
ever agree to relinquish them. As Ilan
Pappé
puts it,

‘This
is all temporary, of course when peace comes, all these measures will
be removed’...you can understand why...after five years of
occupation...one could still be hopeful that the Israelis mean it...
But after almost fifty years, to still stick to this idea which is an
Israeli ploy to deepen the colonization of the areas they have
occupied in 1967, and to wipe out any possibility of negotiating the
areas they occupied in 1948, or the return of the refugees, to do
that is really to be very stagnant and dogmatic in one’s perception
of the reality.

In
1983, Prof.
Yuval Ne'eman,
acting head of the Ministerial Committee on Settlement of the Israeli
Cabinet, comments, ‘Our
effort in colonizing Judea and Samaria (biblical names for the West
Bank)...is to create as soon as possible the fact that there is no
place for a Palestinian Arab state.’

The
only Palestinian state actually on offer is, as Jeff
Halper
describes it,

no
end to settlement construction, land expropriation, house demolitions
(28,000 Palestinian homes demolished since 1967, and counting) or
displacement; recognition of Israel as a “Jewish” state; the
imposition of the Clinton Parameters on East Jerusalem (“what is
Jewish is Israeli, what is Arab is Palestinian,” thus eliminating
completely any kind of coherent urban entity that might serve as the
Palestinians’ capital); Israel’s retention of at least six major
settlement “blocs,” strategically placed to fragment the West
Bank into disconnected and impoverished cantons while isolating what
remains of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; long-term
or permanent Israeli military control over the Jordan Valley and
Palestine’s borders with Egypt and Jordan – well, the list goes
on: Israeli control over Palestinian airspace, over their
electromagnetic sphere (communications), etc. etc. etc.

A
popular misconception among advocates of the TSS is that ongoing
encroachment by Israeli settlements, bypass roads, and the rest of
the 'matrix of control' will reduce the eventual rump Palestinian
state to a series of discontiguous bantustans. While not actually
false, this view misses the point that a Palestinian state was never
going to be anything other than a bantustan, or more likely two or
more discontiguous bantustans, even if it comprised the full 22% of
Mandatory Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, because
their function is to isolate a population in an ethnically
homogeneous enclave adorned with some of the trappings of political
autonomy with a view to preventing their exercise of citizens’ or
residence rights in the metropole, exactly analogous to
Bophuthatswana.

Another
widely held misconception is that Israel's creation of ‘facts on
the ground’ since 1967 have rendered The Two State Solution™
impossible,
as intended, or soon will.

In
February 2009, Mustafa
Barghouti,
a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said, ‘The
window is rapidly closing on the two-state solution’.
The following month, former US National Security Advisor Brent
Scowcroft
and other luminaries
warned that ‘the
next six to twelve months may well represent the last chance for a
fair, viable and lasting solution’,
using fair
and viable
in a sense M&D would understand.
In November 2010, long after the Scowcroft window had slammed
decisively shut, British Foreign Secretary William
Hague
said, ‘I
am very worried that the window of opportunity is closing. There is
real urgency to that’.
‘The
window of opportunity is not only closing on the two-state solution,
but on the U.S.’s central involvement in the peace process’,
wrote Palestinian negotiator Saeb
Erekat
in December 2012. In April 2013, US Secretary of State John
Kerry
said, ‘I
believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we
have some period of time – a year to year-and-a-half to two years,
or it's over’.
Three months later, ‘Even
Netanyahu
appears to have recognized that the window for a two-state solution
is rapidly closing and has recently begun speaking of his
determination to avoid a one-state reality.’
In March 2014, Obama
himself announced that ‘the
window is closing for a peace deal that both the Israelis can accept
and the Palestinians can accept…’
And in April 2016, the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the
Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO)
wrote, ‘The
viability of a two-state solution...is in danger…’

In
reality, whether there is a Two State 'Solution' depends entirely on
the problem it is to solve. If the problem is that millions of
Palestinians are stateless and have been subject to Israeli military
occupation for 50 years; that millions more have lived in exile for
69 years; and that over a million more live as twelfth class
citizens, principally in isolated enclaves always facing the threat
of relocation or house demolition; then the TSS solves little for the
first group and nothing for the others.

If,
on the other hand, the problem
is, as liberal zionist lobby group J Street enunciates it, ‘With
the Jewish and Arab populations between the Jordan River and
Mediterranean Sea at near-parity, demographic trends preclude Israel
from maintaining control over all of Greater Israel while remaining a
democratic state and a homeland for the Jewish people’,
then the TSS really is a solution and will remain a solution, unless,
of course, in former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert's
immortal words, ‘we
face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as
soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished’.

So
the Two State Solution™
is really nothing more than a strategem to defuse the fabled
‘demographic
time bomb’,
which is one of the reasons soi
disant
‘progressive’ partitionists like M&D cannot countenance the
right of return, however sincere their empathy for the refugees. The
‘genuinely
progressive view, based on support for Israel’s existence’
turns out to demand more compromise and empathy from the Palestinians
than from the Israelis and isn't at all clear on who the parties to
dialogue are to be.

Furthermore,
as I've argued elsewhere,
the TSS requires its adherents to execute a number of cognitive
convolutions. Support for partition – pace
Ali Abunimah – entails
that one of those states should be a Jewish state with a robust
Jewish majority, which implies embracing such odious principles as
ethnocracy, terrorist attacks on civilian targets, colonialism,
ethnic cleansing, and permanent exile and expropriation of refugees.

Most
progressives consider these principles directly antithetical to the
kind that support class solidarity, or even bourgeois liberalism.
‘Liberal Zionists’ who claim to reject these principles have to
exempt Israel and brand themselves as hypocrites.

In
my view, a just partition of Palestine has never been possible. Even
if we accepted the contention that Zionism is ‘at
its core the Jewish people’s aspiration for national
self-determination in their historic homeland’
and that Jews constitute a ‘people’ of the kind that can exercise
the right to self
determination
(p. 5), it is patently unjust to do so at the expense of another
people’s rights. In other words, however well founded the Jewish
people's claim to self determination, it can’t extinguish the
Palestinian people’s. Nor does the right to self determination
guarantee ethnic homogeneity or countenance the expulsion or
oppression of other peoples.

Mendes
and Dyrenfurth purport to advocate a ‘genuinely
progressive view, based on support for Israel’s existence and
recognition of Palestinian rights to a homeland’
(p.
14). They criticise Netanyahu for failing ‘to
promote a two-state solution’
(p. 7). They apparently reject ‘suicide
bombings and other forms of violence against civilians’
(they clearly mean ‘against Israelis’, civilian or otherwise, and
not, say, shelling residential buildings in Gaza), and of course the
entire book is a rejection of BDS as a tactic to exert pressure on
Israel. So what potent force do they propose will achieve their
stated objectives?

Parents
Circle – Families Forum, which includes about 600 families who have
lost relatives to violence associated with the conflict

This
organisation maintains an up to date website
and an active Facebook
page boasting nearly 7000 ‘Likes’. Unlike a concerted global
campaign initiated by Palestinian civil society groups, 1200 bereaved
parents can clearly bring The Middle East Conflict™
to a swift conclusion.

...the
OneVoice Movement, which hosts a number of public forums and
activities aimed at jointly promoting Israeli and Palestinian support
for peace

OneVoice
turns out to be a much more signficant organisation, whose website
claims over 750,000 people ‘support’ it. The most recent ‘News’
is dated December 2015. About 21,000 ‘Like’ their Facebook
page. Their mission is ‘providing
the centrist mainstream on both sides with the opportunities and
tools to build momentum for a peace agreement and #2StatesNOW.’
They claim, ‘While
a majority of Israelis and Palestinians support the two-state
solution, an emphasis on the risks of an agreement and the
compromises it entails has led many to lose sight of the
transformative change that peace can bring.’

This
is the same mob that carried out a comprehensive, if flawed, survey
in Israel (including Israeli Palestinians) and the Palestinian
territories in February 2009, which is now only accessible via the
site’s ‘History’
page,
and concluded, ‘The
analysis of the substantive issues covered in...this poll suggests
that the shape of an agreement for a two state solution may not be
very different to the various solutions proposed in the past.’
My
analysis
differs radically from OneVoice pollster Colin Irwin’s, at least if
the opinions reported have any influence on ‘the
shape of an agreement’.
While ‘74%
of West Bank & Gaza Palestinians and 78% of Israelis are willing
to accept a two state solution’,
their views on the nuts and bolts are diametrically opposed. For
instance, 98% of the respondents in the Palestinian Territories said
it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlers should leave the
occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished’, but 53%
of those in Israel said it was ‘Unacceptable’. Similarly, it was
‘Essential’ to 91% of those in the Palestinian Territories for
Jerusalem to be in ‘Palestine’, and to 45% of those in Israel for
Israel to retain control of Jerusalem.

Trade
Unions Linking Israel and Palestine (TULIP) is an international
organisation that promotes co-operation between Israeli and
Palestinian trade unions, with the overarching aim of promoting the
viability of a two-state solution

For
the record, the TULIP page on Facebook
has attracted 2858 likes, the most recent post is dated 3 December
2015, and posts appear not to inspire comments. There is no list of
affiliates on the TULIP website,
strongly suggesting either that this vast network of workers’
organisations has attracted support from none, or that those that
have affiliated don’t want that information published. It is worth
noting that in their commitment to equality for Palestinians, TULIP’s
website provides translations of its founding
statement
into Hebrew and German, but not Arabic. In contrast, over 145,000
‘Like’ the BDS
Movement
page, with current, daily posts and comments.

the
Peres Center for Peace, a non-political organisation that promotes
partnerships between Israelis and Palestinians in a range of health,
cultural and sporting areas

The
Peres Center website
states, ‘Our
mission is to promote lasting peace and advancement in the Middle
East by fostering tolerance, economic and technological development,
innovation, cooperation and well-being – all in the spirit of
President Peres’ vision.’
This appears to be a real organisation that provides medical services
and training with an active website, updated recently, and a Facebook
page, with over 21,000 ‘Likes’.

M&D
report that ‘the
Third
Narrative Academic
Advisory Council (TTN) rejects black-and-white interpretations of the
conflict’.
According to their ‘About’
page, ‘We
feel a deep connection to the Jewish state and the Jewish people. We
are also committed to social justice and human rights for everyone.
Some say those commitments are contradictory’.
Well, yes, we do. And it has nothing to do with ‘belonging
to a people’.
Among the issues they don’t seem to feel any need to address are
how an avowedly Jewish state can deliver justice for everyone, and
how the deep connection to the Jewish state promotes a nuanced,
balanced understanding, when they don’t even pretend a similar
connection to the Palestinian people?

Organising
forums, training doctors, promoting dialogue are doubtless worthy
activities. But if Mendes and Dyrenfurth imagine that such
initiatives will budge the settlements, achieve security and self
determination, or anything significant, in our lifetimes or our
grandchildren’s, they are wilfully deluded. While it's true that
BDS has not achieved its stated objectives in its first ten years,
Parents’ Circle has been at it for 20, the Peres Center for 19, and
OneVoice for 14, and their stated aims, too, remain unmet.

But
then, as I hope I’ve shown, if Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth
think themselves ‘two
progressive Jewish opponents of the “Israel-always-right” lobby’,
(p. 12) delusion is their milieu.